synaesthesia and learning

I have been wondering for a while whether I can use synaesthesia to help with my memory but so far it’s still just confusing me. E.g. Recently I had to remember the number 770074 (I think that’s the number anyway!) but I’ve been having trouble with it because zero is transparent, and for some reason the dark blue 4 drops off the end into an abyss, so that when I try and remember the number, all I can see clearly is the two green 7s at the beginning and then the other seven faintly with darkness at the end. What I see is this:

But I had an email today from the synesthesia mailing list again and the message that caught my eye was from someone who has learnt to use their synaesthesia to their own benefit. This person was struggling with maths so started to concentrate on the synaesthesia while carrying out equations. She found out that by noticing the syn more she was able to see not only the colour of the numbers, but also the colours of the square roots etc around the number too, so by thinking about the number, the colours that appeared in association with that number provided the answers to other things.

I can only hope I can figure out a method like this for remembering things.

synesthesia Q&A (part 1)

I recently tried an online test called The Synaesthesia Battery and thought it might be of interest to anyone wanting to know more about synaesthesia.

Bear in mind that there are lots of different types of synaesthesia, and within each type are many variations, so it’s very probable that a lot of what I say won’t be experienced by other grapheme-colour synaesthetes, and likewise there will be similarities too – I guess that’s the point of the questionnaire. These are my answers.

When did your synesthesia begin?

Always had it

Can you think of any experiences that could have shaped your synesthetic associations, like childhood colored letter blocks?

Yes it’s possible that alphabet and number charts were the cause of some associations but I can’t remember anything specific. There are some names where I think the colour stems back to the first person I knew of that name (e.g. benjamin is orange, and the first benjamin I knew had bright ginger hair, and John is grey and the first John I knew wore a grey shirt at school when everyone else wore white)

Do you experience synesthesia all the time, or only under certain conditions?

All the time

Is your synesthesia present when you close your eyes?

Yes

Does your synesthesia interfere with other activities?

No

Does your synesthesia ever distract you?

I get distracted by everything anyway, but my synaesthesia does not distract me in a way that I can’t control

Do you feel that paying attention to your synesthetic perception requires effort?

A little. If I am being asked about my synaesthesia I find it difficult to answer the questions because I feel bombarded and get mixed up, but in a normal relaxed environment I have no trouble paying attention to it

Can you ignore your synesthesia?

It’s always there, but only very noticeable when I stop on a word or think about something

Does your synesthesia help you to remember things (by association)?

Numbers up to about 20 are easier to remember, but I think the synaesthesia either does nothing for my memory or just confuses me. Sometimes if I am trying to remember a word I can only remember its colour and not the actual word which is completely useless

Are there any properties of your synesthetic perceptions that make it easy to tell that they are internal (in your head) rather than external (in the outside world)? For instance, is the synesthetic yellow color you may see with a certain number different in any way from a real yellow color?

The colours, although vivid, are in a way transparent at the same time. So if I go into Photoshop and pick the colour for Wednesday, it will never be exact because my Wednesday will be a transparent orange rather than the block of orange I have picked in Photoshop.

i wonder

I’d be interested to know what percentage of grapheme-colour synaesthetes actually ‘pass’ this test…

If a grapheme-colour synaesthete (such as myself) is shown this…

…then according to research, the synaesthete should be able to identify the shape within the image…

To me, the original image is just a load of black shapes on a page that don’t even look like 5s and 2s. There’s certainly no colour that pops out at me on the page. A page of black text is a page of black text and yet every letter and number is a colour when I think about it. I just wonder which is most common amongst grapheme-colour synaesthetes – actually seeing bold colours on a page of text or just knowing the colours are there but not actually seeing them instantly.

days and numbers

This is just a quick overview of roughly what the numbers and days of the week look like. For some I couldn’t find the exact colour but I tried to get them as close as possible, and zero isn’t actually white as such, it’s kind of transparent I suppose but that’s hard to represent in a jpeg.